Biden blasts misinformation' during health care town hall

Leisure World crowd seems largely supportive of reform

Vice President Joseph Biden listens to a question from a Leisure World resident about health care on Sept. 23.

At 77 years old, Mary Zenchoff says that she and other senior citizens are afraid that proposed health care reform will mean fewer doctors, less care, and yes — even death panels.

Vice President Joseph Biden spoke before Zenchoff and more than 100 other residents of Leisure World in Aspen Hill on Sept. 23 to dispel what he called misinformation and outright lies that have been spread about health care reform efforts.

Leisure World, a community of 8,500 residents, most of whom are 55 and older, also was the site of U.S. Rep. Christopher Van Hollen Jr.'s health care forum earlier this month.

Biden took only four questions from residents who appeared to support health care reform proposals.

Maryland's U.S. Sens. Barbara A. Mikulski (D) and Benjamin L. Cardin (D) attended the event, along with Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius and Nancy-Ann DeParle, director of the White House Office of Health Reform.

Todd E. Eberly, a St. Mary's College professor and coordinator of public policy studies, agrees that there has been misinformation — or at least a selective interpretation — on both sides of the health care debate.

There were no death panels in any legislation, he said referring to a Republican talking point, and a public option hardly qualifies as socialized medicine.

However, Democratic claims that cutting Medicare reimbursements to providers will not reduce the number of doctors accepting Medicare might be inaccurate, Eberly said.

And down the road, Eberly envisions a time when proposed health care reform might force patients to change doctors.

"Based on current legislation, nothing would force you to change," he said. "But if Congress enacts minimum benefits standards and your insurance company doesn't offer it and doesn't want to, you will be shut out of the system, and you will have to opt into a new plan."

Zenchoff, a Republican, says that although she has Medicare she is worried that the proposed plan will mean she will lose her insurance and be forced into the government plan.

"I'm used to having a choice, and I feel like that's what the government plan will take away," she said.

Health care bills now being debated seek to fix flaws in the nation's health care system, supporters have said. The bills ban insurance companies from using pre-existing conditions to deny medical care to customers and would provide a health care option for people whose employers do not offer medical benefits.

The debate over health care reform has grown heated since the summer, when town halls drew passionate supporters from both sides.

Biden said Sept. 23 that talk of death panels, socialized medicine and a gutting of Medicare were "scare tactics" — the same ones Republicans used to dissuade the nation from adopting Medicare in the 1960s.

"The overall assertion that the team that built [Medicare] is now the team that wants to destroy it, and the ones who opposed it now want to preserve it, give me a break," Biden said.

The vice president said the plan calls for finding $500 billion in savings in the current Medicare program by reducing fraud and waste. Currently, he said, insurance companies are receiving inflated premiums that could be cut, and hospitals are receiving government money to help care for the uninsured — payments that could be eliminated if health care becomes more affordable and therefore more widely used under proposed reforms.